The Online Trust Alliance today announced their 2012 Honor Roll, a unique and important tradition that highlights the online services that have adopted best practices in online security and privacy. At PrivacyChoice we’re celebrating this year’s announcement for two reasons.
First, we made the list! And in the course of doing so we learned a ton about how to improve the security and privacy framework across all of our services. There’s more work to do, but the OTA program gave us a priority checklist and resources we needed to make progress quickly.
Second, we’re delighted to announce that the OTA has incorporated Privacyscore into the Honor Roll methodology. This means that Honor Roll results reflect in part our innovative scoring framework, which assesses both first-party privacy policies of a site and the qualifications of third-party data collectors. The program also was a spur for us to add hundreds of new sites for Privacyscore monitoring, which extended our reach across site categories and geographies. Plus we have had the chance to interact with fellow OTA members about their scores, getting valuable feedback for our roadmap.
As we have learned in the launch of Privacyscore, nothing focuses an organization like a specific, independently measured goal. If your own site doesn’t meet the OTA Honor Roll methodology, get to work!